KHARTOUM (AFP) — Ethnic clashes in
Sudan’s Blue
Nile state in a deadly land dispute killed 105 people and wounded 291, the
state’s health minister said, providing a new toll Wednesday.
اضافة اعلان
Fighting broke out in the southern state on the
borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan on July 11 between members of the Berti
and Hausa ethnic groups.
“The situation is now calm,” state health minister
Jamal Nasser told AFP by telephone from the state capital Al-Damazin, some
460km south of Khartoum.
The deployment of the army had eased the fighting
since Saturday, he said.
“The challenge now is in sheltering the displaced,”
Nasser said.
The UN said Tuesday that more than 17,000 people
have fled their homes from the fighting, with 14,000 “sheltering in three
schools in Al-Damazin.”
Between January and March this year, the
UN said aid
was provided to 563,000 people in Blue Nile.
Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries and
mired in an economic crisis that has deepened since an October coup led by army
chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, has seen only rare interludes of civilian rule
since independence.
In Sudan, deadly clashes regularly erupt over land,
livestock and access to water and grazing, especially in areas still awash with
weapons left over from decades of civil war.
Fighting in Blue Nile reportedly broke out after
Bertis rejected a Hausa request to create a “civil authority to supervise
access to land”, a prominent Hausa member said.
But a senior Berti leader said the group was
responding to a “violation” of their land by the Hausas.
While fighting is
reported to have stopped and relative calm returned to Blue Nile, tensions have
escalated in other states, where the Hausa people have taken to the streets
demanding “justice for the martyrs”.
Thousands protested Tuesday in Khartoum, North Kordofan,
Kassala, Gedaref, and Port Sudan, according to AFP correspondents.
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